Digital marketing trends food and beverage brands cannot ignore in 2026
The specific 2026 digital marketing trends most relevant to food and beverage brands, prioritised for visual discovery and retail media coordination.
5 min read
Programmatic advertising has matured significantly with improved transparency tools, but genuine, specific waste sources remain common across many programmatic budgets, worth actively auditing for rather than assuming platform sophistication alone has eliminated the problem.
Where waste still commonly hides
- Made-for-advertising sites with low genuine content value but high ad inventory volume.
- Excessive supply chain intermediary fees reducing the actual share of spend reaching genuine media placement.
- Placement in low-visibility or fraudulent inventory that technically registers an impression without genuine viewability.
Why these problems persist despite improved tooling
Transparency tools exist, but many advertisers do not actively use them to audit their own specific supply paths — the tools' existence does not automatically translate into their actual, disciplined application, leaving genuine waste unaddressed even where the means to find it are readily available.
The tools to find programmatic waste have improved dramatically — the gap is not tooling availability, it is whether anyone is actually, regularly using those tools to audit a specific account's real spend.
A practical audit approach
- Review supply path optimisation reports available through most major programmatic platforms.
- Check for and exclude made-for-advertising domains from your buying strategy.
- Verify genuine viewability and fraud detection metrics, not just raw impression counts.
Frequently asked questions
How much programmatic budget is typically wasted on these issues?
This varies significantly by account and platform, but industry analyses have consistently found meaningful, recoverable waste across many programmatic budgets when genuinely audited.
Do major platforms provide the tools needed for this audit directly?
Many do offer relevant reporting, though third-party verification and fraud detection tools can provide additional, independent insight beyond what the buying platform itself reports.
How often should a programmatic supply path audit be conducted?
Quarterly is a reasonable cadence, given how quickly supply paths and inventory quality can shift.
If you want help auditing your programmatic advertising for hidden waste, talk to our team.
The takeaway
Audit your programmatic supply path and ad placement quality directly this quarter — the specific waste sources covered here (made-for-advertising sites, excessive supply chain fees) remain common enough that most programmatic budgets have real, recoverable savings hiding in plain sight.
Written by Fibvo — Bengaluru and Erode, India — working with clients in other time zones. Questions, or think we have it wrong? Tell us.
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